I found The Search for 100 Million Missing Women, an article written by Dubner and Levitt in 2005, primarily interesting with its catchy and intriguing title. The issue (as intriguing and educational as it was) tackled in the said article, however, was what kept me glued reading it. Dubnet and Levitt (2005) discussed Amartya Sen’s claim of “100 million missing women” in Asia in 1990. Sen thought, with the aide of the measurement tools of economics, of misogyny (hatred of women) as the culprit of the crime.
Emily Oster, an Economics graduate from Harvard, widened her perspective and later found what she claimed to be the real cause of the decline of the ratio between men and women – Hepatitis B. 2. How does the article relate to the economic terms described and defined in the PowerPoint Presentation from module 1? (choose 2-3 terms) It seems that optimality is what gave Oster’s research an advantage. Lack of resources might have been what led to Sen’s assumption of misogyny’s being behind the 100 million missing women in Asia. Oster was critical and resourceful enough to take Sen’s assumption inaccurate or, at least, incomplete.
Here, optimality proves to be helpful in lessening the consequences that might result from false, inaccurate, or incomplete assumptions. 3. Choose one of the “Big Ideas” referred to in the presentation. Discuss how it may apply to the issue in your article. I think Idea number 1, Choices involve tradeoffs – we always give something up to get something else, of the “Big Ideas” referred to in the presentation is most applicable to the issue tackled in my chosen article as backed up by the research error that occurred with the Narratives from the Crib and the lines from the article:
“The key to Oster’s research was the availability of large and reliable sets of data. This is the advantage in economics that is not always conferred on the other social sciences. ” (Dubnet and Levitt, 2005) Oster’s extension of Sen’s assumption on the case of the 100 million missing women was a depiction of how tradeoffs are involved in making choices. Sen’s previous assumption of misogyny being the culprit to the crime has somewhat been traded off to Oster’s findings of Hepa B being the cause of the lesser number of women as compared with men in, for instance, China. 4.
What are the future implications of this article and its effects on the economy? Are there any policy implications? The population is an important aspect that greatly affects the economy. The issue tackled in my article of choice, then, has effects on the resources, demands, and supply present in countries it covers. Concretely, Oster’s findings on Hepa B’s posted threat on the number of women in the country would magnify the importance of vaccines, proper education, and preemptive measures so as to prevent the occurrence and spreading of Hepa B to the rest of and all over the world.
References Dubner, S. and Levitt, S. (2005).
“The Search for 100 Million Missing Women: An economics detective story. ” Slate. Retrieved May 14, 2010 from http://www. slate. com/id/2119402 Dubner, S. and Levitt, S. (2009).
“Articles. ” Retrieved May 14, 2010 from http://freakonomicsbook. com/articles/index. html King, W. (1999).
Chapter 1: Economics: A reasonable dialogue. Essential Principles of Economics: A Hypermedia Text. Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.
Retrieved February 22, 2010 from: http://faculty. lebow. drexel. edu/McCainR//top/prin/txt/Intro/Ch1ToC. html Rittenberg L. and T. Tregarthen (2009).
Chapter 1: Economics: The Study of Choice Principles of Microeconomic Analysis. FlatworldKnowledge. com. Retrieved May 13, 2010 from: http://www. flatworldknowledge. com/pub/1. 0/principles-microeconomics#book- 28243 WordNet. (n. d. ).
WordNet Search – 3. 0. Retrieved May 14, 2010 from http://wordnetweb. princeton. edu/perl/webwn? s=misogyny